Before we get started, let’s address the elephant in the room. Rails is great. It really is what you need for large scale production applications most of the time. It has history. And if you got started in Ruby working on the web, chances are Rails is what you are most familiar with. All these things are a fair argument for Rails as the framework of choice for many projects.

The point of this article is not to... derail (sorry, could not resist!) our beloved Rails. The main goal is to shed some light on alternatives that you may or may not have been aware of. Some will focus on small scale projects, others fast prototyping, but all of them will work with Ruby and hopefully you will have fun exploring the frameworks and micro-frameworks that help bring this great language to the web.

Amazon’s T2 instances have been available on Engine Yard since December. These instances are a "low-cost, General Purpose instance type that are designed to provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the ability to burst above the baseline."

I wanted to see just how much more powerful the T2 instances were, compared to the previous generation of m1.Smalls. To test this, I am going to compare three instance types: the t2.micro, t2.small, and m1.small.

A year or so back I was speaking at Cascadia Ruby and I met with a friend and colleague of mine, Gerlando Piro. He was at the conference to attend and give his first ever lightning talk. And in five minutes, my interest was piqued about Jekyll, a simple—very Ruby—way to create static websites and blogs.

Recently, I took some time to look at using Jekyll. I’ve had experience with WordPress, services like Blogger, and of course I’ve done the classic (but now a bit dated) Learn Rails by building a blog in 15 minutes. But I needed to know what the differences were. Was Jekyll more hands on, like building a blog in Rails? Or was it all templating hoping for the best like WordPress? Here’s what I found out.

UPDATE February 26, 2015: Today the FCC voted in favor of reclassifying internet access under Title II of the Telecommunications Act. The 3-2 vote was, according to this time.com article, split along party lines, with Republican officials voting against it, and Democrats in favor of the reclassification that would protect net neutrality nation-wide. It is now expected that various trade industry groups with monetary backing from firms such as AT&T and Comcast, among others, will proceed with multiple lawsuits in an attempt to force a court to overturn the FCC's decision on this matter, or eradicate its authority, as it pertains to regulating the internet, entirely. In the author's opinion, it would not be surprising to see this battle eventually wind up in the Supreme Court within a few years.

UPDATE February 6, 2015: Tom Wheeler (Chairman, FCC) has announced that he will indeed propose to the commission that the FCC regulate broadband (mobile and otherwise) under Title II of the Telecommunications Act. This means that the commission will vote on whether or not to do this. The announcement itself is equivalent to winning a battle in the war - not the whole thing.

Additionally, it is largely expected for ISPs to band together in a massive lawsuit to prevent the FCC from enforcing these rules, should the commission vote in favor of Mr. Wheeler’s proposal. This fight will, in the author’s opinion, eventually wind up in the Supreme Court.

Finally, Congressional Republicans are reported to have two major strategies in play to defeat this: one is to introduce new legislation that would recognize net neutrality as law, but prevent the FCC from enforcing it. The second is to rewrite portions of the Communications Act to strip the FCC of its legal powers.

In light of these facts, it is very important to contact your senators, representative, and all five members of the FCC’s Commission listed below to voice your support for granting the FCC power to enforce real net neutrality.

Net Neutrality. We’ve all heard the term, and we’ve heard of the fights going on in the halls of Congress for years now. But right now - in February 2015 - the fight is heating up and coming to a head.

Engine Yard generally avoids entering into the political fray. It’s a lose-lose proposition for most companies to take a stand on political issues of any kind, simply because of the plethora of opinions involved. However, on this issue, we believe it is important to speak up.

Are you getting memcached interruptions in your application logs? Does memcached say its been running but your app says something else?

Diagnosing the Problem

The first step is to check memcached stats with Telnet. If you’re running on Engine Yard (we use Gentoo) you can run emerge -g netkit-telnetd on your memcached server. You can then telnet localhost 11211 and then type stats. You should see something like this: